posted at 5:21 pm on May 23, 2013 by Allahpundit

Via NRO, this isn’t really a surprise. Josh Marshall and Ezra Klein both called for Lerner to go yesterday, a day after their little powwow at the White House. Maybe that’s a coincidence or maybe it’s something more, but either way it’s proof that even liberals thought it was time for another sacrifice to appease the scandal gods.

Lois Lerner, the Internal Revenue Service’s director of exempt organizations, has been placed on administrative leave, according to a source in the agency’s Cincinnati office.

Lerner on Thursday afternoon sent an e-mail to employees in the exempt organizations division she oversees stating, “Due to the events of recent days, I am on administrative leave starting today. An announcement will be made shortly informing you who will be acting while I am on administrative leave. I know all of you will continue to support EO’s mission during these difficult times.” She concluded, “I thank you for all your hard work and dedication,” adding, “The work you do is important.”

Old White House ally Carl Levin and new White House ally John McCain sent the IRS a letter just this morning calling for Lerner’s termination, and now here we are.

Why “administrative leave” instead of a firing? Three reasons. One: Now that Lerner’s stated publicly that she did no wrong and invoked her Fifth Amendment right in Congress, the Due Process President probably doesn’t want to pull the trapdoor until she’s given her side of the story. If in fact it turns out that the order to target conservative groups came from somewhere else, canning her straightaway would make a bad situation worse. Two: As we know from Benghazi, “administrative leave” is the administration’s preferred way to handle a crisis. It’s a nice middle ground between doing nothing at all, which plays badly with voters, and firing someone outright. Why kick someone off the payroll when you can simply “suspend” them, keep the checks coming so they stay quiet, and then quietly reinstate them later after the public’s stopped paying attention?

[A]s a civil servant, she is protected by both the full weight of federal law and the advocacy of a powerful union, making her tricky to get rid of…

Part of the reason so few federal workers are let go is surely the, shall we say, culture of lowered expectations synonymous with government bureaucracy. But the greater part of it is that firings are complex and time-consuming. Forty-nine states have “at-will” employment laws, meaning that, specific contracts and covenants aside, a private-sector employer can let an employee go for any reason at all, with a few exceptions for things like discrimination and (ironically enough) the intimidation of whistleblowers. But in Washington, the process can take 18 months or more.

“It’s much more difficult to fire government workers, because it requires much more evidence of wrongdoing, and it is a longer process for creating the paperwork, for documenting it, and so forth,” Donald Kettl, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, tells me. “There are lots of cases where supervisors give up, and either decide it’s easier to transfer [a poor employee] or, in the time-honored tradition, to promote them.”

Exit question: Will this affect Lerner’s willingness to testify? If she feels wronged by being suspended, it might convince her to give up the goods on some higher-up, assuming she has the goods. But then, that’s the virtue of administrative leave from the IRS’s perspective — by keeping her employed, they’re giving her an incentive to keep her mouth shut. If she plays ball and stays silent, there may yet be a job for her again a few months from now.

Update: Yep.

Lois Lerner is on administrative leave with pay, or as we used to call it back in the day, vacation.

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We need a law that makes Pleading the fifth a simple, complete, and immediate resignation from with the exception of military service any government job with complete forfeiture of any and all benefits.

Isn’t she “management”? Do public employee unions represent both employees and management? If she isn’t a member of the union and being defended by them, one would think the rank and file would be screaming for her head.

They’re not taking a gamble. She can see the bus coming her way and is trying to avoid it, but they’ll get her. The only thing that can save her is if she knows something worth telling, and I’ll bet she doesn’t. It wasn’t her that met with David Plouffe, or some other political staffer at the WH.

Uttering the words President Biden leaves a rather bad taste in my mouth, so I would rather we merely expose the flaws of the 44th President and making him squirm for the rest of his term.

Let’s just focus on getting the truth about the IRS, Benghazi, AP-gate, Obamacare, and everything else out there in full Monty-mode for the whole country to see. I’m betting that the MSM won’t be able to stop the signal once that exposure has been accomplished.

As for Ms. Lerner, I hope she grows a conscience between now and her next appearance on Capital Hill. If nothing else, she needs to be removed from the ranks of federal employment.

I think it’s wonderful that we Private Sector Normies, who are “Employees at Will,” with barely any job protection, have the opportunity to pay for the extended vacation of a woman who signed off on letters to Tea Party organizations telling them to go pound sand, who lied to Congress when she testified under oath that she did nothing wrong, and who actively targets the people who pay her salary.

That is SO much better than using our tax dollars to, say, help disabled veterans. Is this a great country or what?

And three, as Dan Foster reminds us today at NRO: It’s exceedingly hard to fire a federal employee, thanks in part to the sort of government unions that are routinely championed by Barack Obama.

And now that there is some evidence that the head of the union over the IRS has been involved in the targeting, I say bring in the union head, classify it as a crime organization, and then work on passing a law that bans unions from federal government.

She needs to be FIRED!! What is this with taxpayers money paying someone to do nothing, while when she was working at the IRS she was destroying the moral fabric of what America stands for. She did a HORRIBLE job!

No, she is not a union member. She is either a GS-15 manager or an SES manager. If she is SES, she can be fired immediately. If a GS then she can be fired after a 30 day notification that she can appeal to the Merit Services Protection Board. She committed fireable offenses and it is just a matter that the agency wants to fire her and will go through the appeal process. Managers and SES are prohibited from being union members.

They aren’t going to fire her until they are in the position were there is no threat of “hell hath no fury.” She certainly isn’t going to resign because right now she has leverage to keep getting paid but not have to do anything for it.

Forget about the debate about whether Lerner did or didn’t waive her 5th amendment rights. She was called before congress and refused to answer questions while congress was performing their oversight role over the IRS. That alone should be grounds for termination.

Progs love to crow about GOP scandals (because the occassional page-diddler means the entire party are a bunch of closeted self-loathers and act out of some childish sort of defiance rather than governing soberly), but almost every single time one of these guys gets called out, they resign. Themselves. Like Bob Livingston.

The one notable exception I can think of is Mark Sanford, who won’t go away no matter how much they try to get rid of him. The GOP even tried to impeach him as governor, but was blocked… BY DEMOCRATS. TWICE. And the third time they just went through the motions and dropped the whole thing. And even after he retires as governor, here he is again, even though the only person we want less than him is Stephen Colbert’s sister.

By contrast, if your a Dem and you diddle an underage congressional page, you get a subcommittee chair. If you send your boyfriend to work at the GSE you’re supposed to be regulating, but instead push over a cliff, you get to chair the Financial Services Committee. If you run shady land deals out of your home state using your legislative power, you get to be majority leader. If you shag your interns in the Oval Office, you are heralded as the greatest president of a generation. Even if you fly down to your home district in the middle of the worst hurricane disaster in 50 years, and commandeer military resources from rescue operations to get your bribe money out of your house, and have to be rescued yourself, you get re-elected in the wake of indictment on felony corruption charges, and the other party gets accused of “locking black people in the Superdome to die”.